Job postings
1,755,610
across all career areas
Skills Explorer
Skills and credentials employers ask for
Choose a career area and country to find the job skills, people skills, credentials, and tools employers ask for—and see what sets that work apart.
About the data1,755,610 public job postings
Salary comparisons use a separate all-country study. The country choice still applies to Skills, Credentials, and Education.
Different skills
1,402
shown with these filters
Skill requests
6,898,394
one posting can ask for several skills
Top job-specific skill
Microsoft Office
asked for in 7.74% of all job postings
Job-specific skills and tools
Technical skills, workplace knowledge, and tools employers ask for most often
People skills
Communication, teamwork, leadership, and ways of working
What sets this career area apart
Skills that appear more often in this career area than in job postings overall
Microsoft Office
Employers ask for Microsoft Office in 135,887 job postings across all career areas (7.74%). Choose a career area to see whether it is especially common there.
Skills often found with it across the full study
Education employers ask for
See how often job postings ask for each degree or education level in the selected career area.
Job postings
—
checked in this career area
Education levels
—
with enough data to show
Education requests found
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one posting may name more than one level
Most common
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by share of job postings
Education requirements
How often employers require, prefer, or otherwise name each education level
| Education level | Share of postings | Required | Preferred | Other wording |
|---|
Credentials employers ask for
Choose a career area to see its most in-demand certifications and licenses.
What this tells you: how often employers require or prefer a credential in job postings.
Credentials shown
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with enough data to include
Credential requests found
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in the selected career area
Job postings checked
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across all career areas
Credential categories
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shown with this filter
Most in-demand credentials
Credentials employers ask for in the selected career area
Roles with the highest credential demand
The share of each role’s job postings that name the credential
Quick answers
A plain-language summary of what the job-posting data shows
Which job-specific skills appear most often?
Across 1,755,610 job postings, the job-specific skills and tools employers ask for most often are Microsoft Office (135,887 postings), Microsoft Excel (134,073 postings), Documentation (127,664 postings), Reporting (88,565 postings), Writing (77,719 postings), and Transportation (71,805 postings).
Which people skills do employers ask for most?
The people skills employers ask for most often are Communication Skills, Service Orientation, Cooperation, Attention to Detail, Leadership Orientation, and Complex Problem Solving. Choose a career area above to see which ones are especially common for that work.
What information does this explorer include?
We found at least one known skill or qualification in 94.8% of the job postings checked. The explorer includes people skills, job-specific skills, software, professional knowledge, credentials, education, and languages.
Can I compare skills by country?
Yes. Choose a country above, then combine it with a broad career area or individual role. The current report has publishable country samples for 104 countries, led by United States, India, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia.
Where these numbers come from
How we turn public job postings into the results on this page
1 · Start with trusted skill lists
We use the public O*NET 30.3 database and Corvi Careers’ reviewed lists of software, credentials, education, and languages. O*NET content is available under CC BY 4.0.
2 · Analyze job postings offline
We analyze the collected job postings before publishing this report. A skill counts once per posting when its name or a reviewed variation appears. Country results use the posting’s resolved locations; remote or multi-country postings may count in each applicable country.
3 · Show only useful comparisons
We compare the percentage of postings that contain each skill. We leave out results with too little data. The findings describe job postings; they do not prove cause and effect.